Photo exhibit at Fitchburg State examines the many sides of the color pink

Tuesday

Feb 4, 2014 at 6:00 AMFeb 5, 2014 at 11:08 AM

By Nancy Sheehan CORRESPONDENT

The color pink wasn't always associated with girls. In earlier eras it was considered a watered down version of red, a power color, so little boys were dressed in pink while blue was considered more appropriately demure for girls, some researchers say.

There are theories about why that color concept eventually was flipped around but, by the time most people reading this were born, pink had long taken on an exaggeratedly feminine connotation, one that Boston photographer Lisa Kessler didn't like when she was growing up. She was afraid the color would trap her in a stultifying, gender-based box.

"I was not a pink girl in any way," Kessler said, in a recent interview in which she talked about her upcoming exhibition at Fitchburg State University. "I avoided it all costs because in our lifetime pink has always been kind of a girly girl color and I was never a girly girl. I didn't want to be labeled or limited in any way and I thought the color might limit me."

What Kessler does like, however, is an artistic challenge. She has tackled tough topics such as the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church, which resulted in the powerful documentary film "Heart in the Wound." After spending years immersed in that challenging topic, she felt a need for a change of direction. A friend suggested she explore the color pink for its varied visual and cultural connotations.

"The idea just appealed to me," she said. "It's very visual, and pink is very loaded for people. They often have very strong reactions and very strong feelings about the color. It has a lot of layers of meaning and it also is a topic I wasn't really comfortable with, which is how I tend to like to work."

The result was "Seeing Pink," a collection of documentary photographs that explores the color pink in its many connotations.

The show, a strong collection of 20 very individual pieces, will kick off the reopening of the university's Hammond Hall Art Gallery on a high note. The gallery has been closed for three years during renovations at the campus center in which it is housed. The show opens Feb. 5; Kessler will give a gallery talk at 5 p.m. Feb. 12. The program is part of the CenterStage at Fitchburg State University arts and culture series. The show runs through March 28.

Kessler spent three years crisscrossing the country in a search of all things pink. Her first road trip involved driving from Boston down to Mississippi. "I went out and bought myself a pink skirt and a little pastel purse and I just decided to go with it," she said. The uncustomary garb served as a camouflage of sorts for Kessler.

"I photograph in real places. They're real people. I don't set things up," she said. "So it's very important to me that I'm not the center of attention, that I kind of blend in. And I was headed down south; I'm tall and dark-haired and Jewish and I don't look like the stereotypical Southern woman. Coming down there with black clothes and boots wasn't going to work."

The Internet was one of Kessler's closest allies during her cross-country quests. In a search box, she would just type in the name of a state she was headed to and the word "pink." The search "Iowa pink" brought her to places that resulted in two of the collection's most important photos. In "Hot Pink Grannies," Kessler captured a senior women's basketball team that proudly wears shocking pink stockings as part of their unconventional uniforms, seemingly in defiance of the notion that seniors are expected to fade quietly into the background in our youth-oriented culture.

In another Iowa photo, the visiting team's locker room at University of Iowa is depicted in all it's calculatedly soft pinkness.

It was the controversial color choice of legendary former football Coach Hayden Fry, who had been a psychology major and knew the sedating effects of pastel pink. "He had the visitor's football locker room painted pink to deflate the opposition and lower their energy," Kessler said. And the home team's colors? "It's blue and gold and incredibly charged and energetic, and you can see how you'd totally get pumped up," she said.

On a trip to the Huntington Library in California, Kessler composed "Pinkie," a photograph that includes in the background Thomas Lawrence's famous 1794 portrait of the same name.

The pink-clad young girl in the Lawrence painting hangs on an opposite gallery wall from Thomas Gainsborough's painting The Blue Boy.

When library founder, railroad magnate Henry Huntington, bought both paintings in 1921, however, he showed them side by side in an exhibition that caught the public's fancy, especially in the West Coast environs of the library. The pairing was so popular that there soon were reproduction portraits hanging in homes across America.

Then came drink coasters, lamps and all manner of Pinkie and Blue Boy kitsch that still turns up on auction websites today.

Gender historians Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough have argued that this is when the pink-for-girls and blue-for-boys color schemes became etched in stone. While acknowledging that theory is open to debate, Kessler deems it plausible.

"There was such clamor and the public so adored them that they became very popular motifs," she said. "My boyfriend grew up in California, and at his elementary school they used Pinkie for the girls room and Blue Boy for the boys room. They were very popular, much more I think on the West Coast. Donnie and Marie Osmond did a Pinkie and Blue Boy skit."

While being parodied on "Donnie & Marie" in the 1970s might have marked the end of Pinkie and Blue Boy's popularity run, the rosy hue stayed on as a symbol of femininity's softest, most deferential aspects until recently when it has undergone a radical redefinition. Kessler's photograph of players in the Boston Derby Dames roller derby league bear little resemblance to the gentle portrait of Pinkie, beyond being clad in pink.

The derby photo, called "The Nutcrackers," is named after one of the league's teams. "They are kick-ass," Kessler said. "They are women who are just really strong and really aggressive and they're dressing in pink — in little tutus."

Another photo focuses on the hot pink go-go boots of a member of Code Pink, a vocal women's peace and social justice group.

"Their quote is that they've reclaimed and redefined the color for women. They've kind of turned it around," Kessler said.

Her involvement in the project also turned Kessler's ideas about pink completely around.

"The great thing about the project is the color no longer has that power over me," she said.

"I can do whatever I want with it. Wear it, not wear it — it doesn't have the meaning that it used to have. A lot of the things that people have done with the color pink are very empowering, and as soon as you start looking at something closely and broadly, you realize it's not what you thought it was. It's much bigger. It's much more complicated. It's much more nuanced. It's so much more interesting, and there's nothing to be afraid of."